This article summarizes findings originally reported by information-management.com, drawing on a Forrester Research study titled “As Tech Management Structures Change, Roles Become More Strategic and Externally Focused,” authored by Marc Cecere.
IT Organizations Are Being Redesigned From the Ground Up
Enterprises are fundamentally rethinking how IT operations are structured to better serve external customers. That shift is forcing a redefinition of many traditional job roles — and exposing a significant skills gap. According to a Forrester Research study by analyst Marc Cecere, many organizations report that they lack sufficient in-house expertise in analytics and data management, two capabilities that are becoming central to modern IT strategy.
The study examines how key IT roles will evolve over the next five to seven years from the time of publication (2017). Its conclusions remain highly relevant as the trends it identified — cloud adoption, automation, and DevOps normalization — have only accelerated since.
Three Core Takeaways from the Forrester Study
1. IT Headcounts Will Shrink Significantly
According to Cecere, “Automation, cloud, external services, and empowered business users will reduce the number of people needed in IT.” The trigger for visible headcount reductions, he argues, will be the retirement or re-engineering of large legacy system estates. Once organizations complete that migration work, the underlying operational workload that has historically required large IT teams will shrink substantially.
2. Remaining Roles Will Be More Strategic and Externally Focused
The roles that survive — architects, developers, and platform engineers — will look very different from their predecessors. “Many of the roles, such as architects and developers, will require increased business knowledge, consulting skills, and responsibilities that span the enterprise rather than a narrow functional area, technology, or business unit,” Cecere notes.
In practice, this means IT professionals can no longer operate as pure technologists working in isolation from business strategy. They must understand the customer outcomes their systems support and be capable of communicating across organizational boundaries.
3. Agile and DevOps Will Become the Default Delivery Model
“DevOps teams combined with agile methods will become the accepted means of building capabilities,” Cecere states. Rather than a niche practice or a transformation initiative, DevOps is expected to be the standard operating model for IT delivery — the baseline assumption rather than a competitive differentiator.
What Skills Will IT Professionals Actually Need?
The study’s most actionable message is directed at individual IT professionals: the time to reassess and upgrade your skills is now. With fewer total IT jobs available, positions will go to those who can clearly demonstrate business value. The most in-demand capabilities cited in the report include:
- Analytics and artificial intelligence — the highest-priority skill gap identified across organizations.
- Emerging technology specializations — including voice recognition, IoT, machine learning, and blockchain.
- Agile and DevOps methods — as process competencies, not just tool familiarity.
- Business knowledge and consulting skills — the ability to engage effectively with business stakeholders who are increasingly involved in IT decision-making.
“Specialization will be required in hot new technologies, including voice recognition, IoT, machine learning and blockchain, and methods such as agile and DevOps,” Cecere explains.
How Data and Analytics Roles Will Evolve
One of the more nuanced findings involves how data functions will be restructured. Cecere defines data and analytics roles broadly — covering data analysis, master data management, data integration, and data architecture — and predicts that these functions will become more segmented between business and IT units.
Rather than being centralized in a single data team, data experts will be aligned with specific business initiatives. Cecere describes this as a “major and minor” model:
“Machine learning, for example, requires people who know the algorithms, data and business purpose of the project. Business intelligence requires expertise in tools such as those from SAS, Microsoft or Tableau Software. These are different, but overlapping areas. To support these initiatives, data experts will have a major in tools and methods and a minor in initiatives such as machine learning, automation and business intelligence.”
— Marc Cecere, Forrester Research
This framing has practical implications for hiring and career development: deep specialization in one area combined with working knowledge of adjacent domains will be the expected profile for data professionals.
Automation Specialists Will Be a Dedicated Role
Cecere also identifies a growing need for dedicated automation specialists — a role distinct from developers or business analysts. These professionals will own end-to-end process automation, maintaining expertise in tools (the study cites UiPath and Pegasus as examples) as well as software engineering methods and the business processes being automated.
“Business and IT processes have been automated for as long as there have been organizations. Within IT this has been done by BAs, developers, engineers and numerous others. Future IT organizations will include automation specialists with knowledge of tools, such as UiPath and Pegasus, software engineering methods and business processes. These experts are dedicated to automating processes and keeping up to date with associated tools and techniques.”
— Marc Cecere, Forrester Research
Moving Toward a Multi-Sourced IT Environment
The organizational model itself is changing. IT departments are moving away from owning and operating internal assets — servers, data centers, custom applications — toward managing a portfolio of sourced services. Cecere describes this as a multi-sourced environment in which “their use of micro-services, contingent workers, cloud, and internal capabilities [are] recast as services.”
This shift places a premium on vendor management, service integration, and governance skills — capabilities that have not always been a focus of traditional IT career development.
What This Means for DevOps Practitioners
For engineers already working in DevOps, these findings validate the direction of the field while flagging areas to invest in:
- Data literacy is no longer optional. DevOps engineers who can instrument systems, analyze telemetry, and draw business-relevant conclusions from operational data will be significantly more valuable than those who cannot.
- Automation expertise is a career track, not just a task. Understanding the full lifecycle of automated workflows — from design to monitoring to continuous improvement — positions engineers for the specialist roles Cecere describes.
- Business context matters. DevOps practitioners who can articulate the business impact of their work and collaborate with product and finance stakeholders will be harder to replace than those who cannot.
- Platform and cloud skills remain essential. The move away from internal assets toward managed services reinforces the value of cloud-native expertise.
The broader message is straightforward: the IT roles that survive the coming automation wave will be those that add demonstrable, business-facing value. The time to build those capabilities is before the demand peaks — not after the restructuring begins.